Received wisdom

Norrington’s genius is not really for persuading.  It’s for provoking, and for liberating us from the dead weight of received “wisdom.”

-Richard Morrison, BBC Music Magazine

Sir Roger Norrington is a conductor whose unconventional musical interpretations have informed the art-music world.  Morrison’s entire article on this musical iconoclast was fair and equally informative.

Far from mere questions of period sensitivity and literal interpretation of questionable tempo markings in composers’ scores, though, a more significant question is begged in my longing heart:  Will a “provoker” arise among Christians to liberate us all in the same vein? 

I am usually discouraged, but only rarely surprised anymore, by the influence that received “church wisdom” seems to have among otherwise thinking people.  Since the Apostle Paul was already writing needed correctives in the middle of the first century, it stands to reason that later theological developments were likely to have moved further from the original intent.  This natural presupposition causes me to look cautiously and curiously, not adoringly or subserviently, at the writings of “church fathers” and at the practices of believing communities in the 2nd, 4th, and 16th centuries, etc.

Although we must learn from later history (in which God did not inspire as He did in the earliest days), we dare not worship it.

Apostasy

This quote is taken from James Gardner’s The Christians in New England:

Perhaps the most serious problem facing the Christians by the 1830s was not a particular false doctrine, but rather an absence of doctrine at all.  Although Smith and Jones had from the first valued morality more than theology, they also believed that the Bible contained certain essential principles, which were “plain, and easy to be understood.” They felt that honest readers could find in the pages of the Bible a clear and certain standard of conduct; but, with the passage of years, the Christians grew increasingly reluctant to hold themselves or each other to the biblical standard.

While Gardner’s historical analysis appears in this brief passage to consist largely of unsupported opinion, I surely wish all Christians groups would analyze things in such terms!  If we (denominations, movements, sects, families, and individuals) looked at ourselves in terms of a) slipping away from, or b) holding tenaciously to, scriptural principles, why, then maybe we wouldn’t all slip as far away from Original Intentions.